


What Hovers in the Space Between Life and Death

by Ariel Rose (thatchaoticart)



Category: Battlestar Galactica, Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 15:30:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatchaoticart/pseuds/Ariel%20Rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pieces of shrapnel are ripping apart Kara from the inside out, and all she can do is let him piece her back together again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Hovers in the Space Between Life and Death

**Author's Note:**

> Mention of Kara/Sam and Kara/Lee.

_He knows you better than you know yourself, Kara Thrace. He knows the truth about you, about your destiny. He’s coming for you. Soon._

Kara’s head is spinning and it won’t stop. At night she lies awake and remembers nothing but bits and pieces here and there; all that sticks in her mind right now is the feeling of his mouth on hers, possessive yet supplicant to her own whims. She remembers him when she is with Sam, remembers the way her hands slid slick over his bare skin, muscles rippling, with all that white paint—her pathetic attempt at erasing him, erasing her destiny—and she gasps with the distantly recalled sensations coursing through her veins, the fear and understanding that all feels more like another lifetime, another  _universe_. She makes Sam think he can still make her gasp this way. Nothing is the same once you feel far away from your body. Nothing of her previous life remains here.

_You don’t get it, do you? I’m not the same girl you married._

She seeks feeling, pure feeling and carnal instinct and raw passion, and finds it in her bed with Sam, but it’s nothing like before. The impact is different, the feel of his body his hands his  _breath_ —they all seem so wrong, like puzzle pieces that almost fit but a small gap in the corners betrays its mistake. Lee is the part of her that wants to emotionally feel but like a scab that keeps rubbing raw, reminds her of Zak too, hard to separate from so much pain. But Leoben—or rather not-Leoben…he  _sees_  her, but more than that, he forces her to see herself. She has looked inside herself and has felt the fire of knowing what is between and beyond ablaze in her soul. But that he has taken the form of Leoben comforts her, somehow.

_They’re waiting for me._

Every day she loses more of the way to Earth is every day closer to madness. She feels the bits and pieces of it, the memories of Leoben engulfing every part of her body and spirit among them, working through her. They’re shredded and sharp like pieces of shrapnel embedded in her brain and limbs, and as the blood pushes them through her body their edges rip at her veins and tear apart every piece of the old Kara, of Starbuck the hotheaded, brash Colonial Fleet Viper pilot. With every second of every hour of every day that goes by since she returned to  _Galactica_  she feels further away from the old her, as if being slowly drawn and quartered.

_What is the most basic article of faith? This is not all that we are. The difference between you and me is, I know what that means and you don’t. I know that I’m more than this body, more than this consciousness…_

Part of her knows that, a part of her buried deep in the back of her mind. Her bones echo with the memory of fire and impact and his weight on her; her mind echoes with his words, raw and husky:  _“don’t fight it,”_  the words that take on such a different meaning now.

But it’s just a brief feeling in her gut, like a flash of lightning in a swirl of clouds before it’s gone and she can’t grasp it to understand it. Like the details of a dream slipping away upon waking, her sanity is falling through the cracks in the floorboards and she clings on to the part of her that knows it’s going to all be okay soon either way, because she no longer fears what is next. Sure, part of her fears she will spend the rest of Kara Thrace’s time searching for a place she can no longer find. But the rest of her knows that her time here is coming to an end soon.

_I see patterns. I know you, you’re damaged._

And he tries to mend her, has always tried even as he laughed and spit out blood and teeth, even as he struggled underwater, knowing she wouldn’t kill him, knowing like she knew his words about destiny made her gut twist even as much as she didn’t want to admit it. When he speaks of her mother she sees red, red as the blood on the dog tags she finds that read “K. THRACE ser 462753”, red as the swath of paint encircling blue, blue as his eyes—

_A part of me swims in the stream. But in truth, I’m standing on the shore. The current never takes me downstream._

But she is already downstream, already fighting her way back and trudging through the impossibly frozen lake of disbelief and resistance stretching out in front of her like all those stars sprawled on her charts, in her head, in the sky above Earth’s sweet-grassed surface. She knows she can’t do it without him to grab onto, and so when he comes to her in her dreams again she clings to him like he is the only thing giving her enough oxygen to just  _breathe_.


End file.
